Charred remains of Netaji's treasure trove: Pictures show gold jewellery Bose carried on his final voyage to fund his struggle from the Soviet Union

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose carried gold jewellery on his final voyage on August 18, 1945

On October 9, 1978, a group of government officials opened a time capsule from Indian history at the National Museum in Janpath.

Officials from the ministries of culture and external affairs watched as museum officials snipped open a sealed canvas diplomatic bag of the MEA, flipped open a steel attache case inside and took out 14 packages.

Inside was a large collection of gold jewellery usually worn by women - earrings, nose studs, gold wire and necklaces, most of them charred and badly burnt.

This is what Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose evidently carried on his final voyage on August 18, 1945.

File No. 25/4/NGO-Vol III in the Ministry of External Affairs, one of 100 ‘Netaji files’ declassified by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on January 23, 2016, records in great detail the only inspection of the 11-kg remnants of the INA treasure, since it had been brought to New Delhi from Japan in 1952.

The declassified files have the first publicly revealed pictures of the treasure.

But what was the revolutionary doing with women’s jewelry?

Historians like Hugh Toye said that Bose wanted his two-year old government-in-exile to depend as little on the Japanese for financing his soldiers, so he raised money from nearly 2 million Indians in erstwhile British colonies conquered by his Japanese allies.

Women gave away their jewellery for the INA.

The Bose treasure comprises a large collection of gold jewellery usually worn by women - including earrings, nose studs, gold wire and necklaces, most of them charred by fire

At one of his famous fundraising public meetings in Rangoon on August 21, 1944, newspapers of the day recalled, a wealthy scion Hiraben Betani gave away 13 of her gold necklaces costing Rs 1.5 lakh.

Many of Bose’s relatives refuse to believe that he died in a plane crash, and have declined to accept his treasure or his ashes

With the defeat of the Japanese empire and dissolution of the INA, Bose packed the treasury - over 80 kg of gold estimated at Rs 1 crore in 1945 - into the boxes that he carried into an aircraft flying to Manchuria from Saigon, Vietnam.

The Shah Nawaz Committee that probed his disappearance in 1956 records how Netaji boarded an overloaded Japanese bomber, shedding his books and clothes but refusing to move without two leather suitcases that contained the treasure.

The treasure would be used to finance the next stage of his struggle in the Soviet Union.

The Japanese aircraft crashed soon after the take-off at Taiwan on August 18, 1945, and Netaji is believed to have died after sustaining grievous burn injuries.

His body was cremated, and the jewellery - most of it badly burnt - salvaged by the Japanese Army and sent to Japan along with his ashes.

It was only a fraction of over 80 kg of gold and jewellery that Bose was believed to have carried, leading MEA officials in Tokyo to suspect that it had been swindled by Bose’s associates.

On January 9, 1953, then PM Pt Jawaharlal Nehru inspected the treasure soon after its return from Tokyo.

He minuted his disappointment, calling it ‘a poor show’, but advised that it should be kept ‘as it is’ because it was the only evidence of the accident and fire.